Month: April 2012

Integrating IPad PDF Annotation with Zotero

Although I continue to advocate storing pretty much everything in Evernote — alongside efficient tagging and organization — I still really wanted to find a way to integrate annotating PDFs directly into my favored citation manager, Zotero. I’m hoping that I’ve hit on a solution.

1) I use the Zotero extension Zotfile to organize and rename attachments to Zotero entries into a folder on my desktop. The attachments are therefore links to local files, not files stored in the Zotero servers.

2) That folder is synced to the cloud — and my office PC — using SugarSync.

3) I open and annotate the PDF using GoodReader, which will then automatically sync the annotations with the files linked to the Zotero entry.

I had been using ZotFile’s “send to tablet” function, alongside iAnnotatePDF’s Aji Reader Service to push files back and forth from my tablet to my PC and then to both Zotero and the cloud.  This new method avoids a number of problems that method entailed.  First, everything is done without having to download individual files via the web or selecting individual files to sync and instead is done automatically. This ensures that I always have access to the files without worrying about finding the most recent version.  It also means that I don’t have to be on my home network to update my files.  Second, the files remain on my desktop in addition to the cloud and are automatically organized.  Third, I avoid quickly exceeding Zotero’s limited free storage space.

I still also e-mail the annotated files to Evernote, since I also want to have all my notes in one place. But until Zotero includes a more robust note taking system, an integrated PDF viewer and/or an iPad app, this method seems to be the best way I’ve found to link annotated articles directly to their metadata.

Lessons of the Holocaust

Two of my courses are in the midst of World War II, a moment I mostly hate teaching, but will almost certainly find myself doing so for the rest of my life. I hate teaching it not simply because of the morbid fascination it always seems to evoke in people — and certainly not just in undergraduates — but because it’s so often cited as the reason to study history in the first place. Learn from the past, so we never repeat it. The Holocaust has come to stand in for the lessons of the past as a whole.

This conviction, propagated by memorials and memoirs, is one I try to challenge as I lecture and as we talk about the Holocaust. And it’s why I’ve assigned Ruth Kluger’s absolutely brutal Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (2001), rather than, say, Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz. Her account refuses to shy away from what the Holocaust actually was: a time of degradation, if in its most modern form. It tore people apart and rarely brought them together. Those who survived often did despite the failures of their neighbors and family, rather than through their righteous support:

When I tell people…that I feel no compunction about citing examples of my mother’s petty cruelties towards me, my hearers act surprised, assume a stance of virtuous indignation, and tell me that, given the hardships we had to endure during the Hitler period, the victims should have come closer together and formed strong bonds. Particularly young people should have done so, say the elderly. But this is sentimental rubbish and depends on a false concept of suffering as a source of moral education (52).

I hate teaching the Holocaust because every time I return to this beautifully, scandalously, brutal book, I can’t help but agree. Primo Levi depicted Auschwitz as a giant laboratory in which one could see how men and women functioned when placed in the most dire of situations. In doing so, he assumes that there is something, however, horrible to learn there. Kluger implies, as Lore Segal’s wonderful introduction notes, that in fact Levi “died of his knowledge” (10). I don’t think that the student of the Holocaust should come away with a newfound appreciation of the resiliency of the human spirit because doing so simply fits the event into a preconceived narrative that allows us to forget what the Holocaust actually was. Instead, the study of the Holocaust is an opportunity to question received ideas and ask whether we’ve been listening effectively to the voices of the past in the first place.